Mount Everest is thought to be the world's tallest mountain, standing at 8,849 metres above sea level. Indeed it stands as the tallest mountain, but only insofar as tall above sea level is concerned. Yet, if the actual heights of mountains from their base up to the peak are measured, the highest mountain is Mauna Kea, with a height of 4,205 meters above sea level but not Mount Everest.

Mount Everest vs. Mauna Kea

Mauna Kea is a dormant volcano on Hawaii island and about 6,000 meters of its base remains submerged below the surface of the Pacific Ocean, which is more than half of its total height. If you calculate the actual height from its base under the ocean till its peak, Mauna Kea would be over 10,000 meters tall, at least 1150 meters taller than Mount Everest.

Mount Everest
Image Source: Wikipedia

Mauna Kea is the tallest volcano in the world. It is deemed to have been formed above a hot spot in Earth's crust. Although its form in the area from which the magma rises and erupts onto the surface is probably stationary, the Pacific Plate was moving over it, forming its base. It lengthened a chain of volcanoes in that direction where the plate was moving northwestward. Mauna Kea is the youngest volcano in the world and formed about a million years ago. However, it remains active and it has been considered that its last eruption must have taken place more than 45,000 years ago.

It is also famous for being the world's largest astronomical observatory, offering perfect settings with cloudless skies and high altitudes. Mauna Loa is considered the second-largest mountain in Hawaii; if measured from its base to the highest peaks, it becomes the second-biggest mountain on Earth. It is actually the largest mountain when viewed as regards volume and area since it happens to be a volcano.

If you measure from Earth's center, neither Mount Everest nor Mauna Kea is the tallest mountain. Mount Chimborazo, in Ecuador, with an elevation of 6,310 meters, is the top in the world. The mountain is far shorter than Mount Everest and incidentally, it is not even the mountain peak in the mountain range where it lives - the Andes. So what makes it the highest point on Earth? Our Earth is not a perfect sphere but an oblate spheroid. Earth is much flatter on the poles but bulges out near the equator. Chimborazo is located just one degree south of the equator, so it is the world's highest point at about 3,967 miles from Earth's core.

Chimborazo is also the Earth's closest point to the sun on the ground, while Mount Everest could not even make the top 20 because it sits at a latitude of 28 degrees north.

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